Obama’s Finest Hour

Posted on by

Further to my post about Obama’s Tucson speech…

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Gary Wills wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books in which he compared Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race with Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union address during his own 1860 campaign. Wills noted that both men had had to separate themselves from embarrassing associations—Lincoln from John Brown’s violent abolitionism, and Obama from Jeremiah Wright’s black nationalism. They had to do this without engaging in divisive attacks or counter-attacks. They did it, Wills argued, “by appeal to the finest traditions of the nation, with hope for the future of those traditions. Obama renounced black nationalism without giving up black pride, which he said was in the great American tradition of self-reliance”.

On the NYRB blog Wills says:

The New York Review wanted to publish a booklet printing the Lincoln and Obama speeches together, but the Obama campaign discouraged that idea, perhaps to avoid any suspicion that they were calling Obama a second Lincoln. Well, I am willing to risk such opposition now, when I say that his Tucson speech bears comparison with two Lincoln speeches even greater than the Cooper Union address. In this case, Obama had to rise above the acrimonious debate about what caused the gunman in Tucson to kill and injure so many people. He side-stepped that issue by celebrating the fallen and the wounded and those who rushed to their assistance. He has been criticized by some for holding a “pep rally” rather than a mourning service. But he was speaking to those who knew and loved and had rallied around the people attacked. He was praising them and those who assisted them, and the cheers were deserved. He said that the proper tribute to them was to live up to their own high expectations of our nation. It was in that context, and not one of recrimination, that he called for civility, service—and, yes, heroism—in the country.

Denis Dutton, RIP

Posted on by

Denis Dutton, the philosopher-cum-scourge-of-mediocrity is dead at the ridiculously young age of 66. He was one of the joys of academic life, and a luminary of the early Web. I first got to know him when I was asked one Christmas for a list of my favourite web sites, and I put his Arts and Letters Daily at the very top because it was the opening page of every browser that I used. Shortly after that, I received a nice, sardonic email message from him, and thus began a sporadic but always enjoyable correspondence. Robert Cottrell has a nice tribute to him on The New York Review of Books blog.

Dutton’s genius lay not in his philosophy, but in his capacity to provoke intelligently. Look at him speaking at a TED conference last year, and you see not only a thinker, but also a charmer, a gentle bruiser, an ironist. Even more than an intellectual, he was an intellectual entrepreneur. In The Art Instinct he found a captivating idea that built on winning themes—evolution, beauty, sex—and he advanced it as if it were truth. At Philosophy and Literature, his great legacy was not so much the promotion of good writing, which all journals have as their object, but the destruction of bad writing, which few in the academy were brave enough to attempt. At ALD, he found his relative advantage not in the production of fine writing, but in the boutique retailing of it, to the benefit of everyone: writers, readers, Dutton himself.

At the end of his piece, Cottrell says “If only there were a ‘more»’ link at the end of Denis Dutton’s life, I would be clicking on it now.”

Me too.

The Colonel and the Net

Posted on by

Brian Whitaker has tuned into Colonel Gaddafi’s views about the Net.

Even you, my Tunisian brothers. You may be reading this Kleenex* and empty talk on the Internet.

This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Internet, and you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of “Facebook” and “Kleenex” and “YouTube”! Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods?

*Footnote: “Kleenex” is apparently Gaddafi-speak for WikiLeaks.

One wonders if any of this has anything to do with the fact that WikiLeaks leaked the name of the Colonel’s voluptuous ‘nurse’?

Palin’s Facebook

Posted on by

Fascinating blog post which starts out documenting the speed and efficiency with which critical comments about Palin are removed from her page and then chokes on this.

A commenter posted the following at 18:12:

“It’s ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as ‘they’ say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly.”

I think I literally gasped when I read that. Remember, Christina Taylor Green was the 9 year old girl killed by the shooter. Apparently she had been brought there by her mom, who thought she might get a kick out of meeting Rep. Giffords, having recently been elected to her student council.

I assumed, as a matter of course, that this particular comment would be deleted with greatest possible speed.

So I kept hitting refresh, hoping to use this as an example to say, “You see, Palin’s Facebook editing at least has the good judgement to remove clearly offensive content such as this.” But it didn’t come down.

Thanks to Peter Armstrong for the link.

Apple’s iBoom

Posted on by

Apple’s iPad business has only been around for 9 months, but it has already generated almost $10 billion in revenue for Apple.

Specifically, Apple shipped 14.8 million iPads last year, generating $9.6 billion in revenue. Last quarter alone, it shipped 7.3 million iPads for $4.6 billion in sales.

That’s amazing. And what’s more amazing is that it’s almost the same amount of revenue as Apple’s almost-27-year-old Mac business, which just put in its best quarter ever, generating $5.4 billion in revenue.

But perhaps what’s most remarkable is how fast Apple is still growing overall. At $26.7 billion in sales last quarter, Apple still grew 71% year-over-year. Crazy.

[Source]

Wedded bliss

Posted on by


Wedded bliss, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Seen in a shop window in Holland.

The strange thing is that the woman looks disaffected and disillusioned already, and the chap is already looking over her shoulder for another model. Or perhaps he’s wondering how on earth they are going to pay for this shindig. No wonder there’s a strong correlation between the price of weddings and the divorce rate.

Legal niceties

Posted on by


Legal niceties, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Spotted on a Dutch street. Reminds me of that old stalwart of Private Eye, Messrs Sue, Grabbit & Run.

And then I Googled for “funny names of legal firms” and discovered — as you’d expect — that there are lots. For example:

  • Lawless & Lawless
  • Low, Ball & Lynch
  • Harness, Dickey & Pierce

    • And there are still more here. Examples:

  • Smart & Biggar
  • Ball & Weed
  • Boring & Leach
  • Bickers & Bickers
  • Rush, Rush & Delay

    • Hmmm… I was a bit suspicious about that last one, on the grounds that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. So I Googled it. This is what I found. Based in Paris, Arkansas. Specialities include:

    Divorce, Bankruptcy, Personal Injury, Over 50 Years of Legal Experience, Death Cases, Drug Cases, Dwi/Tickets, Dwi/Traffic, Family Law, Industrial Accidents, Criminal Law/Drug Cases, Criminal Law, Child Support, Child Custody/Visitation, Car Wrecks, Bond’s Set, Back Injuries, Back & Spinal Injuries, Auto & Truck Accidents, Insurance Cases, Job Injury, Wrongful Death, Workers’ Compensation, Workers Comp, Social Security.

    Getting beaten up in cyberspace

    Posted on by

    The annoying thing about Boris Johnson, the so-called ‘mayor’ of London, is not that he is annoying (though he is) but that he is such a good and amusing columnist. Even by his own high standards, however, today’s Telegraph column about Internet commenters is terrific.

    There used to be a time when filing these comment page pieces was a lonely sort of business. It was like putting your money into a chocolate bar dispenser on a station platform, or practising your tennis serve. Nothing came back. It was fire and forget, hit and run, drive-by opinionising. OK, so if you said something particularly outrageous, a handful of letters would eventually turn up, depending on the mails. If you really put your foot in it and did something that no reader could forgive – such as confusing a yellow labrador with a golden retriever – a few people might be moved to ring the Telegraph switchboard.

    But when any of us write something these days, it is like tiptoeing to a cage with a hunk of meat, and nervously prodding it through the bars. Sometimes the blogosphere will seem happy with the offering and the beast will briefly growl approval; and sometimes there is such a yowling and clamouring that we feel like Clarice Starling as she sets off down the corridor of mental patients, in search of Hannibal the Cannibal.

    It’s lovely stuff, from which he draws the right conclusion, damn him.

    And now, at last, the journalists are getting something like the same treatment; and of course, as a politician who loves writing, I must tremble before the wrath of pheasantplucker [one of the commenters who had said rude things about Johnson], but I also rejoice at the change that has taken place. A broadcast has been turned into a dialogue. When we write our pieces, thousands of eyes are scanning them for errors of fact and taste – and now our critics cannot only harrumph and curse us. They can tell the world – in seconds – where they think we have gone wrong. We are not just writing columns, we are writing wiki-columns, and if we sometimes get beaten up, we also have the satisfaction of gaining the odd grunt of agreement.

    Politicians are being held to account by journalists; journalists are being held to account by their readers – and it cannot be long, the internet being what it is, before the wind of popular scrutiny blows through all the bourgeois professions. What are we going to do about the lawyers?